One guy with an anti-matter weapon can destroy the whole planet. As the availability of anti-matter technology to people rises towards 100% so does the chance of us annihilating ourselves.
Okay, hold it there. This experiment - and all conceivable ones - uses energy-to-matter conversion to create the antimatter. Since energy is converted equally to both matter and antimatter, the theoretical best efficiency of this process is 50%. When antimatter annihilates with matter, it is converted back to energy along with matter, so it releases 200% of its mass in energy. In other words, assuming perfect processes either way, antimatter creation plant acts like an extremely high-capacity battery.
In other words, in order to destroy the world with an antimatter bomb, you first have to produce this energy some other way and store it as antimatter. Hoover Dam produces 2080 megawats, according to Wikipedia, which means 2,080,000,000 Joules/sec. Also according to Wikipedia, a megaton of TNT is equivalent to 4.184×10^15 Joules. This means that it would take about 23 days to produce enough antimatter for a single megaton explosion using all the power produced by the Hoover Dam for this project.
Or, to put it even simpler: to get even nuclear-level antimatter weapons, you need to have nuclear power plants or equivalent to begin with, so why not simply make conventinal nukes ? It's less conspicious and they're less likely to blow up on your own face.
So please stop fear-mongering. It's done us enough harm and killed enough people already by stalling the sprea of nuclear power plants, thus forcing the use of fossil fuel plants to meet our energy needs with all the associated nasty poisonous and mildly radiactive smoke they spill into the air. Mad scientists trying to blow up the world belong to sc-fi stories and have nothing to do with reality.
You can't generate a net positive energy source with antimatter.
Make hydrogen containers with very thin gold walls - or more likely frozen pellets coated with gold. Bombard the gold with a laser, turning the surface layer into antimatter. Antimatter annihilates with the matter below it and creates an explosion, which heats and compresses the hydrogen, igniting a fusion reaction.
It is, essentially, the equivalent of a fission-initiated fusion, which is proven to work and work well. The difference is that there's no lower bound to the size of an antimatter explosion - even a single electron and positron annihilate - so you can make the explosion be of suitable size for a power plant. And of course annihilation, as the name implies, doesn't leave behind radioactive materials, just gamma rays.
Besides, Laser Antimatter Fusion is pretty much the epitome of cool;).
My dream is for someone to finally, FINALLY do this to XCom/UFO - keep the EXACT game mechanics of the original game,
Actually, no. Replace the environment breaking routine with that of XCom 3.
photorealistic (but still manga-esque) graphics.
I don't think that's logically possible.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
Later in the story, Anton has *gasp* married. No, not to a man, but to a woman. In fact he is going to be a father. He is happy, talkative, and engaging. He mentions in passing that his homosexual tendancies have made his marriage harder but that with work they are able to get through it and live a full and happy life.
In my opinion, this is a more disgusting attack on gay rights than any violent diatrabe could ever be.
That sounds like the ex-gay movement. Basing a character in a real-word person can hardly be considered an attack at anyone.
Furthermore, diatribe is not an attack on anyone's rights. "Gays are sick and deluded perverts" is criticism, not an attack on anyone's rights; it only becomes an attack on gay rights if it's followed by " and therefore shouldn't be allowed to do X", where X is marriage, adoption or whatever.
It is very important to understand the difference between these two cases: an attack on person and an attack on rights. Criticism, even flawed, juvenile or outright stupid, is not in itself an attack on anyone's rights. If it's confused with such an attack, you run the risk of having courts ban it, at which point someone's rights - those of free speech - have been violated.
And even if we were to know the probabilities, fact remains that we are here. The event may or may not have been unlikely, but nevertheless still happened. Invoking god in the scenario is as unnecessary as invoking god when sitting at the roulette table for a few hours.
The problem is that this exact same reasoning can be used to counter absolutely anything. Things fall down ? Mere coincidence, there's no such thing as gravity. Electricity and magnetism correlate ? Coincidence, they have nothing to do with one another. You read this message ? Well I sure didn't write it, in fact I don't even exist, nor does Slashdot; you computer simply received some line noise in it's Ethernet interface which, by complete chance, happened to perfectly match the pattern of HTTP communication with Slashdot, if there was such a thing. For that matter, your computer has been broken for years; you just haven't noticed, since cosmic radiation keeps on hitting your monitor in the exact pattern to form these words you're reading on it.
Invoking any causal relationships whatsoever is unnecessary, since everything can be explained by chance. The problem is that once you down that route, physics - and science in general - becomes invalid. So I submit that "coincidence" should be considered an entity, as in "entities shouldn't be needlessly multiplied".
How do you know this universe won't suffer (?) that fate at some point in future ? If we're not wiped out, we'll continue using more and more of the available resources; and ultimately all matter and energy is a resource. Given enough time, we could consume this entire universe and make it into machines; and given enough time, I find it highly likely that our machines will take on more and more characteristics of organic life, and even if they don't, they could be considered as part of our extended phenotype and thus a part of us.
The problem with your example is that you will still remain conscious and aware if you don't win the lottery. Now, rewrite the example to where at the second it becomes clear that you won't win the lottery (i.e. third ball doesn't match one of your numbers) you are killed, then you've got a valid comparison.
"The reason I won the lottery is that I'd been killed if I hadn't." Nope, still doesn't make sense.
This is similar to the quantum suicide thought experiment, except that in addition to proving the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, you're also rich.
The anthropic principle doesn't prove the many-worlds interpretation, the anthropic principle requires the many-worlds interpretation or equivalent. There's a huge difference there.
The anthropic princple in general just says that the Universe is the way it is because if it were not nobody would be here to see it. That does not imply that it was 'made for us', it just means that because we are seeing it, conditions are the way they are.
Actually yes, it implies just that. The word "because" implies a causal relationship between the "universe being like this" and "us being here", and it further implies that the former is caused by the latter.
To demonstrate this point in a more clear fashion, let's move the argument to a less esoteric setting: "Why did I win the lottery ? Because I wouldn't be rich if I hadn't." The anthropic principle is basically arguing this, only the winning lottery numbers are values of the physical constants, which got the exact values which allow life in general and us in particular to exist.
Mind you, there are conditions under which the anthropic principle makes sense. After all, if you keep at it, you will eventually win at lottery. However, it remains to be proven that there are either multiple rounds (cyclic universe) or multiple tickets (many-world theory) or some combination of them in this lottery, and until it has been, the anthropic principle is equivalent to stating that we're either incredibly lucky (literally, one chance out of infinity and we won) or the lottery is fixed (creationism).
I imagine that many of those families may have overlapping domains, so that half of the universes described have strictly increasing entropy,
Our universe doesn't have strictly increasing entropy. Entropy can and does decrease occasionally. It's simply that there are many more high-entropy states than low-entropy states, so a given system is much more likely to be in a high-entropy state at any given moment than in a low-entropy state; it follows that if the universe was in less than maximally entropic state at any given moment, it is more likely going to be in a higher-entropy state than a lower or equally entropic state at any other moment (future or past; the latter is something people often overlook).
I don't think it's possible for this to change, no matter what physics are at work behind the scenes. Entropy is really just a measure of how "special" some state is; the lower the entropy, the more special and unique the state. For entropy to be more likely to decrease than to increase in time would require there to be more special than non-special states, which doesn't make sense.
half of those have light speed as a universal speed limit,
Again, I don't think this can change. Lightspeed as the limit follows from symmetry; specifically, it follows from the fact that all observers are equal, despite their movement in respect to each other. Since modern physics - including string theory - is built on such symmetries, such a solution would conflict with its own premises.
only a few of those utilize our particular Lorentz transformation,
Since Lorentz transformation is simply a mathemathical description of the above mentioned symmetry, I don't think they can change either.
One could find that a whole series of families of solutions seem to describe our universe, except for some minor variations in the laws which can't hold.
Based on the above, I don't think that anything besides the values of various constants can vary from universe to universe. But I'm not a physicist, so I could be wrong.
Their roughing up was only them being removed after refusing. It's not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with their cause, it is a matter of if their rights supersede mine or someone else's. Of course they don't and their actions was out of line while the cops actions were in line with theirs. This means that even though the cops actions were out of line, they were necessary because of the protesters actions.
Please explain how someone not leaving when ordered necessitates the police trying to remove all evidence of their actions after that point ? I mean, it sounds kinda odd that the cops are trying to remove evidence that they did their duty and acted in an exemplary way. Now, if they did something more than was necessary, something along the lines of "let's beat up the damn hippies", then it becomes very understandable. You aren't arguing that the cops should be allowed to break the law and then hide the evidence of that, now are you ?
Just as I hope you use astrology to plan your business activities. Or Ouija boards and chicken entrails...
Real Men plan their business activities based on human hearts, freshly torn from the chests of sacrificial victims and still beating... in tune to Disco Inferno >!-)
If the Almighty Dollar is satisfied with the offering, it then reanimates the heartless corpse, which is why large corporations have so many lawyers.
And software patents in particular are not very well established.
They are well enough established that I, for one, couldn't afford to fight them in court. Can you ?
I realise the dangers of fear mongers, and I certainly think this paralegal bullying needs to be stopped. But in the end, OSS is about code. We can't allow legalities to trump code.
No, OSS is not about code, OSS is about the freedom to modify, use and redistribute programs as you see fit. Having the code is simply a means towards that end. The lack of code is an inconvenience, but can be worked around, as projects like Wine show; however, legalities - software patents specifically - are show-stoppers. Consequently, legalities trump code.
Of course I'm assuming that the only reason people were recording was because they were in on the acts that disrupted the event. Suppose someone videotapes their friend starting a house fire or raping someone else. I know those are felonies but suppose the only reason they were there was because their friend told them to show up. I would think that they shared a little of the blame even if not enough to be criminal but the tape shouldn't be used to further the person's cause. And yes, I'm talking about enviromental terrorists who burn homes after then were built to close to wild life areas and Gang Members video taping new members going through initiation and having to kill someone, rape someone, burn a house down or something in order to get into the gang. The tape shouldn't ever be allowed to eb the evidence for that.
Are you trying to say that the Indian police is a gang who's members raped and killed the protesters prior to setting their houses on fire and throwing them out ? Or did you mean that videotaping a police officer arresting a criminal shouldn't be allowed ? Because, after all, the video in question didn't show the protesters actions, but those of the police.
Extra points for absurd escalation, from "protesters blocking someone's view" into "an arsonist gang who initiates new members with rape and murder". Nothing like a ludicrously disproportional analogy to add flavour to an incoherent argument - that's why I love Slashdot:).
As a result, I've seen much less 'extinguish'ing than usual from them, which can only be a good thing, both for Microsoft themselves, and for the rest of the world.
Actually, it's good for the rest of the world but bad for Microsoft. They're losing their monopoly position and the monopoly power and profits that brings.
Bay was in the right place at the right time. They weren't particularly talented and now you can't do another eBay.
Craigslist ? Huuto.net ?
The only thing eBay has that others don't is mindshare. That's nothing advertising can't fix. EBay also suffers from being located in the US and thus subject to DMCA takedown notices, which basically allow various companies to DOS the second-hand market for their products.
Same with PayPal.
Notoriously unreliable, especially if you're dealing with anything Wal-Mart wouldn't stock. They could be easily one-upped by almost any financial institution; in fact I know several organizations which are actively searching for alternatives due to said unreliability.
Same with Google.
Actually, Google's simple keyword-based search leaves a lot to be desired. A more intelligent search engine, preferably one which would actually comprehend the meaning of the pages it indexed, would replace it in a jiffy, just like Google itself replaced Altavista.
Same with Yahoo.
Um... What, exactly speaking, does Yahoo do nowadays ? I think they're offering e-mail, and they ran a maillist service at some point, but I don't think they've done anything really important or useful since the days of their directory-based search.
No matter how much time and effort you put in today, you will not replicate the success of those companies in their respective niches. Solely because you're not in the right place at the right time.
Aside from Microsoft, you could easily topple any of those companies simply by offering a better service. Microsoft has lock-in; Google, PayPal and eBay don't.
Anecdote: The leading Australian economist's answer to a low wool price was to kill a lot of sheep to make wool scarce. That actually happened. A lot of farmers dutifully killed off most of their flocks, wool was a bit rarer but the price didn't go up because cotton exists. That's some "real world economics" as an example to show how stupidly simplistic their models are and how riduculously overcondent they are about them.
Question: did the economist in question have any investments in the cotton industry ?
Never ascribe to incompetence what can be adequately explained by malice, at least when talking about lawyers, economists or politicians.
The bug won't be fixed until it is confirmed. It isn't confirmed until it is reproducible on more than one machine. It works fine on the two machines sitting in front of me.
It doesn't work fine on the two machines I tested it on.
Don't get me wrong, it pegged my 3Ghz processor at 100% for about 30 seconds, which would normally be unacceptable,
So it doesn't work fine on your machine either./p>
That's three machines this bug has now been reproduced in; four, if your other machine also exhibits this behaviour. Any guesses how many it takes to persuade the Firefox maintainers that yes, this bug indeed exists ? Or at least get them to check the supplied link for a page that demonstrates the bug ?
but the page isn't exactly a common format (5400 lines of different font'ed links).
And it works fine on Firefox 2. Which makes this a regression bug. And frankly, there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for hanging, by which I mean that the UI stops responding, no matter what the web page might contain. Especially since this is not a script, blinkengift, or any other kind of active content, or even an image, but simply static text. And while I could perhaps accept that laying out text is serious business, I just simply can't believe that a simple text search would be in any way affected by the text attributes; nor can I believe that opening a link in a new tab/window can possibly be made more expensive by the layout of the page it was opened from.
So I can't see why they would consider it top priority.
I get a feeling that Firefox maintainers don't consider anything that doesn't contribute to the "shiny" or "cool" factors a priority. Just remember the good old memory leak bug...
Firefox is increasingly becoming like Netscape: new features and shine keep on getting piled on increasingly rotten core, making the whole mess less and less useful with each new release. That tendency eventually led to the death of Netscape and the domination of IE; I wonder if Firefox will follow its ancestor down the path of uselessness.
The question is: I ditched Netscape for IE, and IE for Mozilla, and Mozilla for Firefox; but what will I ditch Firefox for ?
The more cynical part of me wonders if the reason to terminate support for Firefox 2 is to simply force everyone to upgrade. It's a bit too close to The Microsoft Way for comfort...
I wish instead of an english pariliament system after the war, they introduced more the American concept of freedom there after WW2 with a bill of right blocking off the government from intruding in certain areas. A clear deliniation where you can tell the government to stuff it, that they are not the gods of destiny.
They couldn't. Germany, as a state, didn't exist after WW2; it was occupied territory controlled by the winners. For obvious reasons, they engaged in a campaign of de-nazification, which meant banning some speech. The current situation is simply a continuation of that.
Actually, it is. Not only are all humidification plants natural growing ground for fungi - which, if you think about it, is a really bad thing since all the spores will be blown straight to the building - but it actually takes a lot of water to humidify large quantities of air.
A heat exchanger doesn't take much power at all to run,
A heat exchanger of the type described (which, BTW, doesn't work by mixing air, it works by using the mass of the wheel as a heat battery and moving it between the two airstreams) indeed requires very little power to run; just enough to keep the wheel turning against friction losses. Here in Finland we use the same system for, ironically enough, to cut down heating costs. I once saw the ventilation plant for a large school building; the wheel was just a meter in diameter and moved a hundred rotations or so a minute.
Modern advertising is a very different creature from what you seem to think it is. It operates quite well, perhaps even at its best, when (you think) you are not aware of it. When you are not paying attention, you have no chance to rationally evaluate the message it is delivering. It just slips past all your conscious filters right into your subconscious.
Why do people keep on assuming that subconsciousness is ignorant and stupid ? Especially since the correct tactic with advertising is not "rationally evaluating" their message; it's to ignore the message altogether. Of course, since it's becoming harder and harder to tell advertising from anything else, with the advent of astroturfing and product placement, this serves to make me more and more cynical and unwilling to believe anything. I wonder if that's a good or bad thing ?
Show a pretty girl beside a Lexus logo often enough and you'll start getting a hard-on for one even if you can't say just why.
After all the porn I've seen on the Internet, anything they can show in mainstream TV gets a "boring!" rating from my subconsciousness. There's advantages to having your mind spend all the time in a gutter, you know;).
You are basing your opinion of a whole company and all of its current and future products on the actions of a small group of people who made an error in judgment 20+ years ago? Sounds pretty petty to me.
An "error in judgement" ? You figure this "small group of people" didn't realize what a fire exit is for ?
And yeah, the company should be made to hurt for that ad infinitum, or better yet, dissolved. It's the only way to keep companies from doing shit like that.
I particularly liked how a CSI:NY episode matched the marks on a dismembered body's bones to the blade of a particular brand of cordless reciprocating saw, then the same saw was advertised in the commercial break, just in case you had some bodies you needed to dismember.
Look, if you need to dismember bodies, use an axe, not an electric saw. Just because you're a homicidal maniac isn't any excuse to not think of the environment. And you get a good workout out of it too, in preparation for your next psychotic rampage.
Psychos these days... Bah ! Lazy bums, all of them. In my day, we had to dismember our bodies with our teeth, in a snowstorm, after dragging them uphill to the sacrificial grounds. And we were glad to have teeth !
Slashdot Mirror
But can they find the warp zone ?
Okay, hold it there. This experiment - and all conceivable ones - uses energy-to-matter conversion to create the antimatter. Since energy is converted equally to both matter and antimatter, the theoretical best efficiency of this process is 50%. When antimatter annihilates with matter, it is converted back to energy along with matter, so it releases 200% of its mass in energy. In other words, assuming perfect processes either way, antimatter creation plant acts like an extremely high-capacity battery.
In other words, in order to destroy the world with an antimatter bomb, you first have to produce this energy some other way and store it as antimatter. Hoover Dam produces 2080 megawats, according to Wikipedia, which means 2,080,000,000 Joules/sec. Also according to Wikipedia, a megaton of TNT is equivalent to 4.184×10^15 Joules. This means that it would take about 23 days to produce enough antimatter for a single megaton explosion using all the power produced by the Hoover Dam for this project.
Or, to put it even simpler: to get even nuclear-level antimatter weapons, you need to have nuclear power plants or equivalent to begin with, so why not simply make conventinal nukes ? It's less conspicious and they're less likely to blow up on your own face.
So please stop fear-mongering. It's done us enough harm and killed enough people already by stalling the sprea of nuclear power plants, thus forcing the use of fossil fuel plants to meet our energy needs with all the associated nasty poisonous and mildly radiactive smoke they spill into the air. Mad scientists trying to blow up the world belong to sc-fi stories and have nothing to do with reality.
Make hydrogen containers with very thin gold walls - or more likely frozen pellets coated with gold. Bombard the gold with a laser, turning the surface layer into antimatter. Antimatter annihilates with the matter below it and creates an explosion, which heats and compresses the hydrogen, igniting a fusion reaction.
It is, essentially, the equivalent of a fission-initiated fusion, which is proven to work and work well. The difference is that there's no lower bound to the size of an antimatter explosion - even a single electron and positron annihilate - so you can make the explosion be of suitable size for a power plant. And of course annihilation, as the name implies, doesn't leave behind radioactive materials, just gamma rays.
Besides, Laser Antimatter Fusion is pretty much the epitome of cool ;).
Actually, no. Replace the environment breaking routine with that of XCom 3.
I don't think that's logically possible.
That sounds like the ex-gay movement. Basing a character in a real-word person can hardly be considered an attack at anyone.
Furthermore, diatribe is not an attack on anyone's rights. "Gays are sick and deluded perverts" is criticism, not an attack on anyone's rights; it only becomes an attack on gay rights if it's followed by " and therefore shouldn't be allowed to do X", where X is marriage, adoption or whatever.
It is very important to understand the difference between these two cases: an attack on person and an attack on rights. Criticism, even flawed, juvenile or outright stupid, is not in itself an attack on anyone's rights. If it's confused with such an attack, you run the risk of having courts ban it, at which point someone's rights - those of free speech - have been violated.
The problem is that this exact same reasoning can be used to counter absolutely anything. Things fall down ? Mere coincidence, there's no such thing as gravity. Electricity and magnetism correlate ? Coincidence, they have nothing to do with one another. You read this message ? Well I sure didn't write it, in fact I don't even exist, nor does Slashdot; you computer simply received some line noise in it's Ethernet interface which, by complete chance, happened to perfectly match the pattern of HTTP communication with Slashdot, if there was such a thing. For that matter, your computer has been broken for years; you just haven't noticed, since cosmic radiation keeps on hitting your monitor in the exact pattern to form these words you're reading on it.
Invoking any causal relationships whatsoever is unnecessary, since everything can be explained by chance. The problem is that once you down that route, physics - and science in general - becomes invalid. So I submit that "coincidence" should be considered an entity, as in "entities shouldn't be needlessly multiplied".
How do you know this universe won't suffer (?) that fate at some point in future ? If we're not wiped out, we'll continue using more and more of the available resources; and ultimately all matter and energy is a resource. Given enough time, we could consume this entire universe and make it into machines; and given enough time, I find it highly likely that our machines will take on more and more characteristics of organic life, and even if they don't, they could be considered as part of our extended phenotype and thus a part of us.
"The reason I won the lottery is that I'd been killed if I hadn't." Nope, still doesn't make sense.
The anthropic principle doesn't prove the many-worlds interpretation, the anthropic principle requires the many-worlds interpretation or equivalent. There's a huge difference there.
Actually yes, it implies just that. The word "because" implies a causal relationship between the "universe being like this" and "us being here", and it further implies that the former is caused by the latter.
To demonstrate this point in a more clear fashion, let's move the argument to a less esoteric setting: "Why did I win the lottery ? Because I wouldn't be rich if I hadn't." The anthropic principle is basically arguing this, only the winning lottery numbers are values of the physical constants, which got the exact values which allow life in general and us in particular to exist.
Mind you, there are conditions under which the anthropic principle makes sense. After all, if you keep at it, you will eventually win at lottery. However, it remains to be proven that there are either multiple rounds (cyclic universe) or multiple tickets (many-world theory) or some combination of them in this lottery, and until it has been, the anthropic principle is equivalent to stating that we're either incredibly lucky (literally, one chance out of infinity and we won) or the lottery is fixed (creationism).
Our universe doesn't have strictly increasing entropy. Entropy can and does decrease occasionally. It's simply that there are many more high-entropy states than low-entropy states, so a given system is much more likely to be in a high-entropy state at any given moment than in a low-entropy state; it follows that if the universe was in less than maximally entropic state at any given moment, it is more likely going to be in a higher-entropy state than a lower or equally entropic state at any other moment (future or past; the latter is something people often overlook).
I don't think it's possible for this to change, no matter what physics are at work behind the scenes. Entropy is really just a measure of how "special" some state is; the lower the entropy, the more special and unique the state. For entropy to be more likely to decrease than to increase in time would require there to be more special than non-special states, which doesn't make sense.
Again, I don't think this can change. Lightspeed as the limit follows from symmetry; specifically, it follows from the fact that all observers are equal, despite their movement in respect to each other. Since modern physics - including string theory - is built on such symmetries, such a solution would conflict with its own premises.
Since Lorentz transformation is simply a mathemathical description of the above mentioned symmetry, I don't think they can change either.
Based on the above, I don't think that anything besides the values of various constants can vary from universe to universe. But I'm not a physicist, so I could be wrong.
Please explain how someone not leaving when ordered necessitates the police trying to remove all evidence of their actions after that point ? I mean, it sounds kinda odd that the cops are trying to remove evidence that they did their duty and acted in an exemplary way. Now, if they did something more than was necessary, something along the lines of "let's beat up the damn hippies", then it becomes very understandable. You aren't arguing that the cops should be allowed to break the law and then hide the evidence of that, now are you ?
Real Men plan their business activities based on human hearts, freshly torn from the chests of sacrificial victims and still beating... in tune to Disco Inferno >!-)
If the Almighty Dollar is satisfied with the offering, it then reanimates the heartless corpse, which is why large corporations have so many lawyers.
They are well enough established that I, for one, couldn't afford to fight them in court. Can you ?
No, OSS is not about code, OSS is about the freedom to modify, use and redistribute programs as you see fit. Having the code is simply a means towards that end. The lack of code is an inconvenience, but can be worked around, as projects like Wine show; however, legalities - software patents specifically - are show-stoppers. Consequently, legalities trump code.
Are you trying to say that the Indian police is a gang who's members raped and killed the protesters prior to setting their houses on fire and throwing them out ? Or did you mean that videotaping a police officer arresting a criminal shouldn't be allowed ? Because, after all, the video in question didn't show the protesters actions, but those of the police.
Extra points for absurd escalation, from "protesters blocking someone's view" into "an arsonist gang who initiates new members with rape and murder". Nothing like a ludicrously disproportional analogy to add flavour to an incoherent argument - that's why I love Slashdot :).
Actually, it's good for the rest of the world but bad for Microsoft. They're losing their monopoly position and the monopoly power and profits that brings.
Craigslist ? Huuto.net ?
The only thing eBay has that others don't is mindshare. That's nothing advertising can't fix. EBay also suffers from being located in the US and thus subject to DMCA takedown notices, which basically allow various companies to DOS the second-hand market for their products.
Notoriously unreliable, especially if you're dealing with anything Wal-Mart wouldn't stock. They could be easily one-upped by almost any financial institution; in fact I know several organizations which are actively searching for alternatives due to said unreliability.
Actually, Google's simple keyword-based search leaves a lot to be desired. A more intelligent search engine, preferably one which would actually comprehend the meaning of the pages it indexed, would replace it in a jiffy, just like Google itself replaced Altavista.
Um... What, exactly speaking, does Yahoo do nowadays ? I think they're offering e-mail, and they ran a maillist service at some point, but I don't think they've done anything really important or useful since the days of their directory-based search.
Aside from Microsoft, you could easily topple any of those companies simply by offering a better service. Microsoft has lock-in; Google, PayPal and eBay don't.
If you feel the need to argue about the definition of success, the chances are that you don't have it ;).
Question: did the economist in question have any investments in the cotton industry ?
Never ascribe to incompetence what can be adequately explained by malice, at least when talking about lawyers, economists or politicians.
It doesn't work fine on the two machines I tested it on.
So it doesn't work fine on your machine either./p>
That's three machines this bug has now been reproduced in; four, if your other machine also exhibits this behaviour. Any guesses how many it takes to persuade the Firefox maintainers that yes, this bug indeed exists ? Or at least get them to check the supplied link for a page that demonstrates the bug ?
And it works fine on Firefox 2. Which makes this a regression bug. And frankly, there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for hanging, by which I mean that the UI stops responding, no matter what the web page might contain. Especially since this is not a script, blinkengift, or any other kind of active content, or even an image, but simply static text. And while I could perhaps accept that laying out text is serious business, I just simply can't believe that a simple text search would be in any way affected by the text attributes; nor can I believe that opening a link in a new tab/window can possibly be made more expensive by the layout of the page it was opened from.
I get a feeling that Firefox maintainers don't consider anything that doesn't contribute to the "shiny" or "cool" factors a priority. Just remember the good old memory leak bug...
Firefox is increasingly becoming like Netscape: new features and shine keep on getting piled on increasingly rotten core, making the whole mess less and less useful with each new release. That tendency eventually led to the death of Netscape and the domination of IE; I wonder if Firefox will follow its ancestor down the path of uselessness.
The question is: I ditched Netscape for IE, and IE for Mozilla, and Mozilla for Firefox; but what will I ditch Firefox for ?
The more cynical part of me wonders if the reason to terminate support for Firefox 2 is to simply force everyone to upgrade. It's a bit too close to The Microsoft Way for comfort...
Has this bug (453964) been fixed yet ? According to the bug tracker, no one has even bothered looking at it, since it's still "unconfirmed".
Oh well. I guess I'll stay on Firefox 2, then. Or see if I can get IE running under Wine...
They couldn't. Germany, as a state, didn't exist after WW2; it was occupied territory controlled by the winners. For obvious reasons, they engaged in a campaign of de-nazification, which meant banning some speech. The current situation is simply a continuation of that.
Actually, it is. Not only are all humidification plants natural growing ground for fungi - which, if you think about it, is a really bad thing since all the spores will be blown straight to the building - but it actually takes a lot of water to humidify large quantities of air.
A heat exchanger of the type described (which, BTW, doesn't work by mixing air, it works by using the mass of the wheel as a heat battery and moving it between the two airstreams) indeed requires very little power to run; just enough to keep the wheel turning against friction losses. Here in Finland we use the same system for, ironically enough, to cut down heating costs. I once saw the ventilation plant for a large school building; the wheel was just a meter in diameter and moved a hundred rotations or so a minute.
Why do people keep on assuming that subconsciousness is ignorant and stupid ? Especially since the correct tactic with advertising is not "rationally evaluating" their message; it's to ignore the message altogether. Of course, since it's becoming harder and harder to tell advertising from anything else, with the advent of astroturfing and product placement, this serves to make me more and more cynical and unwilling to believe anything. I wonder if that's a good or bad thing ?
After all the porn I've seen on the Internet, anything they can show in mainstream TV gets a "boring!" rating from my subconsciousness. There's advantages to having your mind spend all the time in a gutter, you know ;).
An "error in judgement" ? You figure this "small group of people" didn't realize what a fire exit is for ?
And yeah, the company should be made to hurt for that ad infinitum, or better yet, dissolved. It's the only way to keep companies from doing shit like that.
Look, if you need to dismember bodies, use an axe, not an electric saw. Just because you're a homicidal maniac isn't any excuse to not think of the environment. And you get a good workout out of it too, in preparation for your next psychotic rampage.
Psychos these days... Bah ! Lazy bums, all of them. In my day, we had to dismember our bodies with our teeth, in a snowstorm, after dragging them uphill to the sacrificial grounds. And we were glad to have teeth !